Semantic Refinement with LLMs for Graph Representations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Thapaliya, Safal, Wang, Zehong, Li, Jiazheng, Li, Ziming, Ye, Yanfang, Zhang, Chuxu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Thapaliya, Safal
Wang, Zehong
Li, Jiazheng
Li, Ziming
Ye, Yanfang
Zhang, Chuxu
author_facet Thapaliya, Safal
Wang, Zehong
Li, Jiazheng
Li, Ziming
Ye, Yanfang
Zhang, Chuxu
contents Graph-structured data exhibit substantial heterogeneity in where their predictive signals originate: in some domains, node-level semantics dominate, while in others, structural patterns play a central role. This structure-semantics heterogeneity implies that no graph learning model with a fixed inductive bias can generalize optimally across diverse graph domains. However, most existing methods address this challenge from the model side by incrementally injecting new inductive biases, which remains fundamentally limited given the open-ended diversity of real-world graphs. In this work, we take a data-centric perspective and treat node semantics as a task-adaptive variable. We propose a Graph-Exemplar-guided Semantic Refinement (GES) framework for graph representation learning which -- unlike existing LLM-enhanced methods that generate node descriptions without graph context -- leverages structurally and semantically similar nodes from the graph itself to guide semantic refinement. Specifically, a GNN is first trained to produce predictive states, which along with structural and semantic similarity are used to retrieve in-graph exemplars that inform an LLM in refining node descriptions. We evaluate our approach on both text-rich and text-free graphs. Results show consistent improvements on semantics-rich and structure-dominated graphs, demonstrating the effectiveness of data-centric semantic refinement under structure-semantics heterogeneity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_21106
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Semantic Refinement with LLMs for Graph Representations
Thapaliya, Safal
Wang, Zehong
Li, Jiazheng
Li, Ziming
Ye, Yanfang
Zhang, Chuxu
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Graph-structured data exhibit substantial heterogeneity in where their predictive signals originate: in some domains, node-level semantics dominate, while in others, structural patterns play a central role. This structure-semantics heterogeneity implies that no graph learning model with a fixed inductive bias can generalize optimally across diverse graph domains. However, most existing methods address this challenge from the model side by incrementally injecting new inductive biases, which remains fundamentally limited given the open-ended diversity of real-world graphs. In this work, we take a data-centric perspective and treat node semantics as a task-adaptive variable. We propose a Graph-Exemplar-guided Semantic Refinement (GES) framework for graph representation learning which -- unlike existing LLM-enhanced methods that generate node descriptions without graph context -- leverages structurally and semantically similar nodes from the graph itself to guide semantic refinement. Specifically, a GNN is first trained to produce predictive states, which along with structural and semantic similarity are used to retrieve in-graph exemplars that inform an LLM in refining node descriptions. We evaluate our approach on both text-rich and text-free graphs. Results show consistent improvements on semantics-rich and structure-dominated graphs, demonstrating the effectiveness of data-centric semantic refinement under structure-semantics heterogeneity.
title Semantic Refinement with LLMs for Graph Representations
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21106